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Mapping and Imaging Indigeneity: The Commemorative French Geodesic Mission to Ecuador, 1901-1906
11 February 2020, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Historical Research and UCL Institute of the Americas
Location
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Seminar Room 105UCL Institute of the Americas51 Gordon SquareLondonWC1H 0PN
In part to determine absolute global time, between 1901 and 1906 the French military outfitted a scientific mission to Ecuador to measure the curve of the equatorial meridian and commemorate the famous eighteenth-century Franco-Hispanic Geodesic Mission led by Charles Marie de la Condamine. The commemorative mission’s medical doctor, Paul Rivet, took advantage of the moment to develop a complex web of informants across the Andean and Amazonian sections of the country for a study of indigenous physiology and culture. This paper focuses on the interplay between the mission’s mapping project, its commemorative gestures and Rivet’s ethnology, with an emphasis upon the local sources of Rivet’s study.
About the Speaker
Ernesto Capello is Professor of Latin American History at Macalester College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (Pittsburgh 2011), as well as over twenty articles and book chapters. He is also the author of Mapping Mountains: A Review (forthcoming, Brill) and co-editor of Cartography and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (forthcoming, Routledge). He is currently completing a history of geodesy and visual culture in the equatorial Andes and beginning a new project on U.S. goodwill tours.